This is intentional and not a bug, the feature was intended to be “bump to the top of activity-sorted lists” and the small post triggering a new post indication was a side-effect of all small posts being counted as real posts.
The update for small posts was intended to stop considering them new content, because they’re not really… or at least, they’re not new content on the same level of a post from a person.
Anyway, that really doesn’t help you much… understandably using the new post indicator as part of your workflow is now broken and you want to fix it.
The good news is that there’s now a way to replicate the behavior using our new Workflows plugin… and there’s a lot of flexibility to do some new stuff too, if you’re inclined to.
If you’re on the latest version of Discourse, the Workflow plugin can be enabled from /admin/config/upcoming-changes and then used at /admin/plugins/discourse-workflows/workflows
I’ve created an example workflow you can import and edit if you’d like
stale-topic-workflow.json (2.0 KB)
It’s a simple workflow that bumps topics in a category that haven’t had activity for the past week, and makes the System user reply asking if there’s more information or if the topic can be closed.
That’s the basic “bump with a real reply” — but there are all sorts of conditions and different actions you could add.
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Instead of a reply it could be a whisper, a chat message, an assignment to a group…
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Instead of a bump you could assign it to a random staff member, it could be flagged for review, etc…
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You could bump the topic once, then if there’s no reply for some amount of time after the bump it could be auto-closed…
There are all sorts of possibilities… if you have specific conditions you’d like to recreate I’d be happy to help out.